An Improved Body Shape Definition for Acoustic Guitars

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new, standardized, and compact method for describing acoustic guitar body shapes using polar coordinate transformations, improving consistency and ease of use over traditional descriptions.

Contribution

It proposes a novel closed-form expression in polar coordinates to describe guitar body shapes, addressing the lack of standardization and complexity of existing methods.

Findings

Provides a compact, unambiguous shape description

Enables easy implementation in common software

Facilitates standardization of guitar body shape descriptions

Abstract

Acoustic guitar body shapes usually belong to one of a small number of families of body shapes. However, these shapes are not standardized or even precisely described in the literature on the subject. Rather, they are the result of accumulated tradition and shapes vary so much that many common components must be treated as effectively custom parts. Conventional curve fits are not possible because the shape is not a single valued function. Numerical descriptions such as spline fits will work, but the resulting data is too cumbersome to be easily portable and may be dependent on choice of software. Transforming the problem from rectangular to polar coordinates allows the use of a closed form expression to describe a family of body shapes in a compact and unambiguous way that is easy to implement in widely available software.